Those who make extraordinary claims (such as those arguing in favor of alternative medicine), frequently chide science for its conservatism and the high hurdles it sets for new ideas to be accepted. Having engaged in debates with alt med proponents myself, I have constantly heard the comparison of the theories behind treatments like oscillating frequency therapy or colloidal silver to Copernican cosmology or plate tectonics, once radical ideas that are now accepted as mainstream science. Alt med is ahead of the curve, these proponents claim, and all it will take is a paradigm shift to make everything alt the new standard.
In fact, the author of this post(David Gorski from the blog Science Based Medicine) explains very cogently that Kuhn's ideas about scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts are relevant to explaining why science adopts a skeptical approach, but not as the alt proponents might think:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=442One of the most common refrains from advocates of quackery and “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) is the charge of being “close-minded,” that they reject out of hand any idea that does not fit within their world view. Of course, this is a canard, given that science, including science-based medicine, thrives on the open and free exchange of ideas, and it is not “close-mindedness” that (usually) leads to the rejection of dubious claims. Rather, it is the knowledge that, for many of such claims to be true, huge swaths of our current scientific understanding would have to be in error to such an extent that a major paradigm shift in various basic science would be necessary. While such paradigm shifts occasionally occur, they do not occur without the confluence of huge amounts of evidence, often coming from different fields and directions. In other words, to show that a paradigm is wrong or seriously incomplete requires evidence even more compelling than the evidence supporting the paradigm.
This video, via The World’s Fair, explains why when woo-meisters wrap themselves in the mantle of “open-mindedness” it’s almost always a crock:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI&feature=player_embeddedI’ll have to keep this video around for my medical students to help them counter the inevitable charge of “close-mindedness” by CAM advocates. In fact, the part at the end, with the blond guy letting all sorts of rubbish into his brain because he has no critical thinking filter while demanding that others accept his views without evidence reminds me very much of a male version of Jenny McCarthy, full of the arrogance of ignorance. If the cartoon weren’t of such a good-looking young man, I’d say it was J.B. Handley, although the video does get the cartoonishness right.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
